PhD teaches computer to play Super Mario Bros.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Tom Murphy has a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, a job at Google and is undoubtedly the best “Super Mario Bros.” player who does not use a controller.

From his experience with machine learning from work, he said, “I know that sometimes really elegantly simple techniques, along with lots of data and/or lots of computation, can produce surprisingly good results.”

So he decided to turn his computer into a pretty good “Super Mario Bros.” player.

“The (Nintendo Entertainments System) only has 2kB of RAM, so I can fit about 32 million simulated Nintendos in my home computer,” he said.

First he fed the machine data gathered while he played the game. Then he programmed the computer to “teach” itself by choosing the order of actions that were most successful in the game.

“Super Mario” was a good choice because success is measured simply by points accumulated.

Murphy ended up putting about a month of work in his spare time into the project.

He says maybe the techniques could be applied to testing games or other types of software. “Not many people still care about testing NES software. So I think the main value outside the amusement value is in the object lesson in machine learning and (artificial intelligence),” he said.

His program was featured at an annual CMU conference called SIGBOVIK, which features “research” on bizarre, fun or made-up topics.